Ahed Tamimi’s cousin was beaten into ‘confessing’ that half of his skull was lost in a bicycle accident rather than from an Israeli rubber bullet.

Ahed Tamimi’s new-found international following isn’t sitting well with occupying Israeli troops, who have spent much of 2018 escorting journalists from around the world away from her village of Nabi Saleh, where Tamimi and others staged the infamous protest that ended in police brutality.

Whereas much of the ultra-conservative Israeli press have been cooking up Alex Jones-tier conspiracy theories involving false flags and paid actors in order to dehumanise the destitute residents of the West Bank and justify the state violence that took place there, the army possess the physical power to distort the narrative using coercion, and they are losing no time in doing so.

Mere hours after Mohammed Fadl al-Tamimi left hospital with half of his skull removed and his brain extremely dangerously exposed, Israeli troops arrested the 15-year-old in his home at 3am and, once he was detained, managed to beat him into ‘confessing’ that his injuries were sustained in a ‘bicycle accident’.

Contradicting Mohammed’s impromptu confession of careless cycling, his medical notes still describe a rubber bullet being removed from his brain, and photos of the extracted bullet still exist.

The rubber bullet is the Israeli forces’ non-lethal weapon of choice against unarmed Palestinians. It is actually neither rubber nor non-lethal as described; the majority of the bullet is made of steel with a rubber casing, and they have killed at least 53 civilians since 1990, mostly in Palestine. A paper published in the British Medical Journal concludes that 15% of those hit by rubber bullets suffer severe disabilities akin to Mohammed Tamimi’s.

Despite the story exhibiting more holes than a post-2000s M. Night Shyamalan film, Israeli police and ultra-conservative Zionists quickly seized upon the sham confession as proof that the Israeli attack on unarmed protestors in Nabi Saleh was a hoax, or largely contrived by pro-Palestinian activists for purposes of propaganda.

Yoav Mordechai, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), celebrated Mohammed’s alleged confession on the agency’s Arabic Facebook page, saying that it ‘continues the Tamimi family’s culture of lies and provocation’ in a post which boasted a photograph of the boy’s disfigured head.

The situation in Palestine may be complex beyond words with no shortage of villains on either side. However, stooping to aggressively whitewashing a set of circumstances which led to a child losing half his brain and barely waking up from a three day coma is a fairly sure sign that you have successfully managed to demote ‘the other’s’ intrinsic value to sub-human levels in the pursuit of a political outcome – a trait omnipresent throughout history’s most vile crimes against humanity.

Meanwhile, Ahed Tamimi’s following grows bigger as the sick crimes her family have endured are exposed across the world.